Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Biography

William Angus Wallace (born 31 October 1948) is a Scottish orthopaedic surgeon. He is Professor of Orthopaedic and Accident Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences of the University of Nottingham. He came to widespread public notice for a life-saving surgery he performed using improvised equipment on a British Airways flight in 1995, and for treating Wayne Rooney before the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Cycling 🔗 Aviation/rotorcraft

A human-powered helicopter (HPH) is a helicopter powered solely by one or more humans carried on board. As in other human-powered aircraft, the power is usually generated by pedalling. It remains a considerable engineering challenge to obtain both the power-to-weight ratio and rotor efficiency required to sustain a helicopter in flight.

On 13 June 2013, the AeroVelo Atlas was the first to complete a flight that lasted 64 seconds and reached an altitude of 3.3 metres, thus winning the American Helicopter Society (AHS) International's Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition.

🔗 Physics

The green flash and green ray are meteorological optical phenomena that sometimes occur transiently around the moment of sunset or sunrise. When the conditions are right, a distinct green spot is briefly visible above the upper rim of the Sun's disk; the green appearance usually lasts for no more than two seconds. Rarely, the green flash can resemble a green ray shooting up from the sunset or sunrise point.

Green flashes occur because the earth's atmosphere can cause the light from the Sun to separate out into different colors. Green flashes are a group of similar phenomena that stem from slightly different causes, and therefore, some types of green flashes are more common than others.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Death 🔗 Skepticism

Gloria Ramirez (January 11, 1963 – February 19, 1994) was a woman from Riverside, California who was dubbed "the Toxic Lady" or "the Toxic Woman" by the media when several hospital workers became ill after exposure to her body and blood. She had been admitted to the emergency department while suffering from late-stage cervical cancer. While treating Ramirez, several hospital workers fainted and others experienced symptoms such as shortness of breath and muscle spasms. Five workers required hospitalization, one of whom remained in an intensive care unit for two weeks.

Shortly after arriving at the hospital, Ramirez died from complications related to cancer. The incident was initially considered to be a case of mass hysteria. An investigation by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed that Ramirez had been self-administering dimethyl sulfoxide as a treatment for pain, which converted into dimethyl sulfate, an extremely poisonous and highly carcinogenic alkylating agent, via a series of chemical reactions in the emergency department. Although this theory has been endorsed by the Riverside Coroner's Office and published in the journal Forensic Science International, it is still a matter of debate in the scientific community.

🔗 Mathematics

In mathematics, tetration (or hyper-4) is an operation based on iterated, or repeated, exponentiation. It is the next hyperoperation after exponentiation, but before pentation. The word was coined by Reuben Louis Goodstein from tetra- (four) and iteration.

Under the definition as repeated exponentiation, the notation ${\displaystyle {^{n}a}}$ means ${\displaystyle {a^{a^{\cdot ^{\cdot ^{a}}}}}}$, where n copies of a are iterated via exponentiation, right-to-left, I.e. the application of exponentiation ${\displaystyle n-1}$ times. n is called the "height" of the function, while a is called the "base," analogous to exponentiation. It would be read as "the nth tetration of a".

Tetration is also defined recursively as

${\displaystyle {^{n}a}:={\begin{cases}1&{\text{if }}n=0\\a^{\left(^{(n-1)}a\right)}&{\text{if }}n>0\end{cases}}}$,

allowing for attempts to extend tetration to non-natural numbers such as real and complex numbers.

The two inverses of tetration are called the super-root and the super-logarithm, analogous to the nth root and the logarithmic functions. None of the three functions are elementary.

Tetration is used for the notation of very large numbers.

🔗 United States 🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Terrorism 🔗 New York City 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 New Jersey 🔗 Public Art 🔗 New Jersey/Hudson County

The Black Tom explosion was an act of sabotage by German agents to destroy U.S.-made munitions that were to be supplied to the Allies in World War I. The explosions, which occurred on July 30, 1916, in the New York Harbor, killed four people and destroyed some $20,000,000 worth of military goods. This incident, which happened prior to U.S. entry into World War I, also damaged the Statue of Liberty. It was one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions to have ever occurred.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM, F-RAM or FRAM) is a random-access memory similar in construction to DRAM but using a ferroelectric layer instead of a dielectric layer to achieve non-volatility. FeRAM is one of a growing number of alternative non-volatile random-access memory technologies that offer the same functionality as flash memory.

FeRAM's advantages over Flash include: lower power usage, faster write performance and a much greater maximum read/write endurance (about 10¹⁰ to 10¹⁴ cycles). FeRAMs have data retention times of more than 10 years at +85 °C (up to many decades at lower temperatures). Market disadvantages of FeRAM are much lower storage densities than flash devices, storage capacity limitations and higher cost. Like DRAM, FeRAM's read process is destructive, necessitating a write-after-read architecture.

🔗 Death 🔗 China 🔗 Socialism

The Guangxi Massacre (simplified Chinese: 广西大屠杀; traditional Chinese: 廣西大屠殺; pinyin: Guǎngxī Dàtúshā), or Guangxi Cultural Revolution Massacre (广西文革大屠杀; 廣西文革大屠殺; Guǎngxī Wéngé Dàtúshā), was a series of events involving lynching and direct massacre in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The official record shows an estimated death toll from 100,000 to 150,000. Methods of slaughter included beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, disemboweling, and more. In certain areas including Wuxuan County and Wuming District, massive human cannibalism occurred even though no famine existed; according to public records available, at least 137 people—perhaps hundreds more—were eaten by others and at least thousands of people participated in the cannibalism. Other researchers have pointed out that in a county alone, 421 people had been eaten, and there were reports of cannibalism across dozens of counties in Guangxi.

After the Cultural Revolution, people who were involved in the massacre or cannibalism received only minor punishments during the "Boluan Fanzheng" period; in Wuxuan County where at least 38 people were eaten, fourteen participants were prosecuted, receiving up to 14 years in prison, while ninety-one members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) were expelled from the party and thirty-nine non-party officials were either demoted or had a salary cut. Although the cannibalism was sponsored by local offices of Communist Party and militia, no direct evidence suggests that anyone in the national Communist Party leadership including Mao Zedong endorsed the cannibalism or even knew of it.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Biography/sports and games 🔗 Russia/sports and games in Russia 🔗 Armenia 🔗 Underwater diving 🔗 Swimming

Shavarsh Vladimiri (Vladimirovich) Karapetyan (Armenian: Շավարշ Կարապետյան; born May 19, 1953) is a retired former Soviet finswimmer, best known for saving the lives of 20 people in a 1976 incident in Yerevan.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Education 🔗 Homeschooling 🔗 Alternative education

Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education (also self-learning and self-teaching) is education without the guidance of masters (such as teachers and professors) or institutions (such as schools). Generally, an autodidact is an individual who chooses the subject they will study, their studying material, and the studying rhythm and time. An autodidact may or may not have formal education, and their study may be either a complement or an alternative to formal education. Many notable contributions have been made by autodidacts.